I wrote a little piece inspired by these images. I'm starting to over-write it so i'll send it out now.

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giant gyroscopic space colonies.How are buildings dealt with? there's no way of importing enough material to have a constant supply of fresh building materials. Since it has to last many many years, interior structures will fall into disrepair. Since they'll have to grow forests to manage the air supply they'll build the dwellings of trees grown in rotation-induced simulated gravity. With homes that can decompose. Perhaps there'll be new eras of log cabins in space? A rustic vacation on the way to Alpha-Centauri. Galactic Lincoln logs.

What happens to memories of earth on a one and a half-thousand year migration? The Toroidial Earth society declares that god made the world as a giant tube, and persecutes the infidels who believe there was a sphere from whence they came. Obviously nobody could stand ON a sphere, everyone knows they'd get flung off into the void.

Then the religious leaders' positions are cast into jeopardy when the behemoth derelict floats into the gravitational field of a large planet. Floating along in the silence of space with its 1942 year old lighting systems on the fritz, flickering over the now shabbily-lit riots as the religious factions fight over the science of gravity. Meanwhile their gossamer cocoon begins to deform and several of the structural members bend unnervingly, and one of the clear panels for admission of light is lost forever after the skin of the structure heaved just so and blew a section out.

310 years later the structure is found meandering directionless on the edge of a solar system. The once rich atmosphere is thinned, the hole in the side is patched up with space-grown (and now naturally cryogenically treated and de-oxygenated) lumber and sealed with pitch. The investigative team finds a couple populations of hermits and farmers who wander the dark interior with their small herds of sheep and retire to their wood and sod dwellings on the cavernous floor of the gigantesque manmade bubble. The interior ecology is threadbare in areas, showing carbon nanotube dyke and damaged closed-cell vacuum lining material where once the architects had in their ignorance decreed the course of a river. Where unintended storms formed by the aggressive heating and cooling forces of space have stripped soil and houses from the frame lie there lie overgrown embankments of debris. Riverbeds once classically picturesque become fodder for the poets and photographers who make thoughtful pieces about the stark shadows and on the decomposing infrastructure.